Dolly (4 page)

‘Well, I’m sure he would have wanted it. In any case, it was more or less expected. Everyone was there.’

She looked slightly cheered at this evidence of social success.

‘What will you do now, Dolly?’ asked my father. ‘Will you stay in Brussels?’

‘How can I, my dear? There is only a very small pension, nothing like enough to live on. No, I shall come back here. I’m sure Mother will tide me over.’

Whatever Dolly hoped for, from a circumstance in which there was practically no hope, was unclear. Yet although the eyes were sad and lost the thin lips were resolute.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said, heaving herself forward in her chair with the movement I recognised from her previous visit. ‘I’m a survivor. I’m not one to feel sorry for myself. If I have to put on an act I’ll put on an act. Singing and dancing: that’s what it’s all about.’

This seemed to be her motto, translating a profound belief. It seemed to her essential to cultivate popularity, and she believed, perhaps shrewdly, that she would be socially unacceptable if she appeared to be unfortunate. At this distance I can only admire her for it. She was a chameleon, as I came to learn, changing one country for another, one language for another, without any of the panic or strangeness which affects even the seasoned traveller. Dolly’s curious career, the details of which I learned only later, had left her unmarked, as if all her experiences were instantly absorbed,
leaving no shadow or taint in her mind. She lived in the present, which is actually quite a difficult thing to do. Even now her face brightened as Miss Lawlor brought in tea. It was only years later that I could appreciate Dolly’s courage. Yet she herself did not register her peculiar quality as courage. To her it was merely common sense, allied with a certain basic shrewdness. Singing and dancing, as she said.

‘We are here if you need us,’ said my father, taking both her hands in his.

‘If you could just get me a taxi, Paul,’ she said. It was clear that she found my father attractive. My mother had settled back on the sofa, her face drawn with grief and illness. She was silent and thoughtful for the rest of the evening. My father, who was by now largely recovered, decreed an early night for them both. By half-past nine the flat was silent.

Dolly turned up again the following week. I was out with Miss Lawlor; when I got back Dolly was having tea with my mother. Neither appeared to want to talk to me, for which I was grateful. Dolly seemed to me as she had always seemed: fierce. When she left our house reverted to its normal calm.

That evening my mother recounted the day’s events to my father.

‘Dolly was here,’ she said.

‘How was she?’

‘Not too happy. It seems she has fallen out with Mother.’

‘Entirely foreseeable. Any particular reason?’

‘It seems that Mother was furious about the Catholic funeral.’

‘Your mother has never seemed to me a woman of profound religious conviction.’

‘Yes, darling, but she is Jewish. One tends to forget it: she is so untypical.’

‘I doubt if I should want to go that far.’

‘Well, anyway, she and Dolly had a falling out. Dolly told her that Adèle Rougier had taken charge, and that annoyed her even more. She said she thought it better if Dolly had a place of her own: she would help towards it, and give her a small allowance, but not to rely on her. She said she could see they were both too independent-minded to get along.’

He smiled. He seemed tremendously interested in what had taken place.

‘And how did Dolly take all this?’

‘She is quite remarkable. She said it was up to her to make a new life for herself. She was almost cheerful.’

‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’ he asked. ‘Now that we are back on an even keel I don’t think it will keep us awake.’

They drank in companionable silence. Finally my father laid aside his cup and turned to face my mother.

‘How much?’ he enquired.

My mother hesitated. ‘Five,’ she said. There was a pause. ‘He was my brother, after all.’

‘You have a child, remember.’

That was his only reproach, and yet it was not so much a reproach as a statement of the facts in the case. These facts were not revealed to me until much later. Many of them I had to supply myself. It seemed to me important to reconstruct the story, even to the point of doing a certain amount
of research. I did this for my own satisfaction, to re-establish those elusive facts. In this I revealed myself to be my father’s daughter, the daughter of both my parents, those innocents abroad in a world which they persisted in believing to be both orderly and benign.

M
y mother’s name was Henrietta. My father called her Henry, which I thought was rude of him, until I was old enough to recognise it for what it was: a term of endearment. He would look up from his book with a gleam of pleasure and raise himself fractionally from his chair when she came into the room. They were a placid reticent couple, and as time went by they spoke less and less, conferring with each other almost by osmosis, a process which was successful, since they rarely disagreed.

They met at a recital of French songs at the Wigmore Hall. They sat in adjoining seats, and when my mother dropped her programme he picked it up and handed it to her.

‘What do you think?’ he asked her in the interval. This was her first taste of his elliptical mode of speech, and she responded to it without hesitation.

‘She seemed to me to be under the note in those last three,’ she said.

‘Perhaps she has a cold,’ he observed, and, gazing sternly ahead, remained silent for the rest of the interval. At the end of the concert they applauded moderately, while the rest of the audience expressed fervent appreciation and demanded encores.

‘Would you like coffee?’ he asked, as they left their seats.

‘I should, but my mother will be expecting me home.’

‘Then I will find you a taxi.’

They met in the same place in the following week, although no arrangements had been made. After this second meeting he persuaded her to drink a cup of coffee with him in a café in Wigmore Street. She looked excited and apprehensive, as if such a thing had never happened to her before, although it must have done, since she had been an undergraduate, had left university (Bedford College) the previous June, and was now filling in time until she decided whether or not to do a teacher training course, a prospect which her mother found displeasing since she thought it guaranteed lifelong spinsterhood.

‘I like children,’ confided my mother. ‘But I doubt if I could keep them in order. I like a very quiet kind of life.’

It may have been at that point that he decided to marry her.

They proceeded cautiously. Concerts at the Wigmore Hall were eventually interspersed with visits to exhibitions at the Royal Academy and the Tate Gallery. The conversation became more profuse, but was never in any sense unedited or unguarded. Each retained a certain dignity, and it was the recognition of this quality in the other that bred a particular kind of respect, a respect, moreover, of which, for varying
reasons, they had had little experience in their past lives. During an unusually effusive walk in Kensington Gardens one evening in late summer, each made a moderate confession of attachment to the other. After this, it seemed as if marriage was inevitable.

‘I’m glad this happened in the park,’ said my mother.

‘Yes,’ he replied. The Wigmore Hall would not have been suitable. And the intervals are so inconclusive.’

None of this was necessary as an explanation, for no more than a few sentences had been exchanged, but a rite of passage had been successfully negotiated. Linking arms, they strolled on, emerging into Exhibition Road, where he stopped a taxi for her and stood on the pavement waving goodbye until she vanished in the direction of Maresfield Gardens. Then he turned on his heel and walked back to Prince of Wales Drive, where he occupied a large bachelor flat. With a little adjustment he thought it would do very well for the two of them.

That was the easy part. The difficult part was to introduce each other to their respective families, or in this case mothers, for one was divorced and the other widowed. Both were problematic. Of the two of them Antonia (Toni) Ferber had the edge on Eileen Manning, whose only crime was wrong-headedness. Mrs Ferber, however, had a more awesome repertory of grievances, trailed clouds of distant glory, and was more likely to confound expectations and to raise difficulties. The fact that she was not fond of her daughter did nothing to guarantee her eventual acceptance of the marriage.

Toni Ferber, whom I later came to regard with a high degree of sympathy, was still, at the time of her daughter’s
putative engagement, embroiled in the mythology of her early youth, and regretting that she had not misspent it while she had had the chance. She was marked by her girlhood, as some women are, but in an almost fatal sense, as if all the events that had occurred in later life were a disappointment, a tragic disillusionment. This realisation or understanding gave her handsome face a disdainful look, as if multiple miseries had been undergone. By a supreme irony nothing remained of her earlier prettiness, the prettiness that had made her her father’s darling. Now she looked agelessly adult, as if she had never had a girlhood at all, let alone a legendary one. What grief there was behind that almost Roman façade was all for herself. My mother sensed it, and at the same time knew that nothing she could ever do would make those grim features relax into a fond smile. She resigned herself, therefore, to the task of giving no further offence. Nor did she think that she would be much missed, although it meant that her mother would be left alone. The hardness of Toni’s heart acted as a kind of preservative: my mother was confident that no harm would come to her, alone in the house in Maresfield Gardens, with only a daily help for company. In a confused and genuinely helpless sense my mother recognised that she would leave no gap in her mother’s life, once she had left home.

They were no doubt too fundamentally different ever fully to understand one another. Toni Ferber had been born Toni Meyer, the daughter of an ophthalmologist, in Vienna. She had been given the names Antonia Sara, this last in deference to not too distant Galician forbears, but was always known as Toni. Her father was moderately successful in his
profession, which was something of an irony, as his own eyes were weak and occasionally watery, which gave him a melancholy appearance. This ocular melancholy might even have masked something more profound, as if a genuine grief were manifesting itself in this singularly appropriate symbol. Vienna was alive with metaphors: no explanation was too far-fetched.

Dr Meyer was a widower, his wife having died in childbirth. His household was supervised by a certain Frau Zimmermann, whom he took care never to address as Gusti, although his daughter did. But this was done to annoy, since the infant Toni could not bear her father’s attention to be diverted by any female presence other than her own. She worshipped her father: every morning, before Dr Meyer left the apartment in the Berggasse to cross the landing to his consulting room she performed for him various little songs and dances which she had learned at school or with her music teacher on the previous day. He was uneasy about this, for he could sense the disapproval of Frau Zimmermann, who had strict notions of discipline and to whom Toni was a constant source of aggravation. Sometimes he could sense this disapproval very strongly indeed, for Frau Zimmermann stood rigidly in a corner of the breakfast room while Toni, as she evidently thought, made a fool of herself, and would not leave until the doctor had issued out of the front door to begin his day’s work. Only then would Frau Zimmermann unbend and go about her duties.

The beautiful child—and she was beautiful, for I have seen photographs—experienced both grief and frustration throughout her early years, for with her father’s absence in
the daytime she was left to the mercies of Frau Zimmermann, and even during her years at school she felt a certain anguish when she returned home to the apartment in the afternoon, to find a glass of milk and the sort of pastry that is wrongly called Danish on the table of the breakfast room, and the sort of silence that made her long for the presence of even Frau Zimmermann, whom she hated. Therefore, when her father came home in the evening, she was almost hysterical with relief and gaiety, and set about entertaining him to the best of her ability. He was touched, but he was also embarrassed: she was too fervent, too ardent, and he knew that her affections were too febrile to secure her the serious love of a serious man. There were such men in Vienna, but he knew them too well, men who would delight in a pretty virgin, but only for a few months. For his daughter, of whose eventual marriage he was now beginning to think, he wanted someone simple, someone reliable, someone stalwart. Unfortunately, most of the men he knew were diabolically clever, and although he realised that his daughter possessed both shrewdness and cunning, there was about her a helplessness that made him suffer.

She became twelve, she became fourteen, and then sixteen, and although she was popular with her friends, all of whom he found too spoilt and too shrill, she had not succeeded in securing the attention of any of her friends’ brothers. And still she flirted with him, not recognising the impropriety of her gestures as she perched on his knee or laid her head on his shoulder. At eighteen, when he decided to consider her an adult, whether she liked it or not, he took her with him on a visit to London, where he wished to consult
a colleague. The colleague, who was an old acquaintance from medical school, invited him to dinner, to meet his wife.